Today I found myself going through the big book of costs at work and was interested to come across the pricing for the previous Bond Street station upgrade, this was from the 1995 attempt at CrossRail not the current one. It was a similar scheme (bigger ticket halls, better access, CrossRail connection, etc) but the price was a surprise.

As the gripping saga of what a small child’s name will be rumbles on I am reminded of the importance of picking a good name. Specifically the ancient and noble art of giving a child an unsuitable name just because it’s amusing, exemplified by this classic;

Slightly delayed, but no less barking due to the passage of time, I bring you this beauty;

Italian prosecutors are going after the scientific members of the ‘Major Risk Committee’ for failing to predict the 2009 L’Aquila earthquake. While this is obviously madness, it is still impossible to predict earthquakes, the particularly offensive part is that the politicians who failed to enforce the local building codes are getting off. Or to put it another way the scientists are threatened with prison for not doing the impossible while politicians ignore their own safety laws and so get people killed get away with it.

And the final sweet twist? Thanks to the wonders of the Italian legal system nothing on this case will happen till the Autumn (summer holidays are important!) at which point no decision will be made till next year at the earliest. If justice delayed is justice denied there is no justice in Italy….

Thanks to a mad courageous conspiracy loon seeker of the truth I now know the truth about this not-really-a-disaster.

It was, obviously, North Korean suicide mini-subs on a daring mission to destroy the South Korean and US economies because that’s just how they roll. What would we do without amusing nutters to give us a good laugh now and then?

For some reason this post from last month ended up in my draft section without being published. Despite being a good few weeks out of date I have, at last, finally found the publish button.

The local rag reported a strike at a local(ish) school which I must confess I skimmed over, here’s an online version. Basically three ‘specialist’ ‘language’ teachers are being made redundant and the remaining 17 staff went on strike. Apart from being somewhat surprised that a primary school taught foreign languages to that extend I basically forgot it.

Then today the NUT propaganda leafletnewsletter comic turned up through the post and revealed a few interesting facts. The teachers in question weren’t ‘language’ teachers as the paper had claimed but were in fact ‘Ethnic Minority Achievement’ teachers who were so vital to the school that education nationwide would fail unless they were all reinstated. I might have exaggerated the last part, but not the first.

My simple question is this – isn’t that racist? A teacher who’s job is to only help children with a certain skin colour sounds racist. Still this is the NUT, how could they possibly support racism? Well apart from apartheid style one race conferences. Oh and giving all non-white members two votes in executive committee elections (one normal vote, one for the Minorities rep on the executive). But apart from all that this is most out of character, so clearly I must be missing something. It’s just I’ve no idea what.